Minneapolis's Stone Arch Bridge began life hauling wheat, not walkers. Railroad baron James J. Hill built it in 1881, the sole stone span across the Mississippi's Upper Falls, for $650,000, a sum worth roughly $17.8 million today. Hill was Minnesota's answer to a robber baron, later famous for his Empire Builder line to the Pacific coast. His old mansion still stands for anyone curious.

For nearly a century, freight trains hauled grain down from Canada across its limestone arches, right up until 1978, when the tracks fell silent. The bridge sat abandoned through the 1980s, a quiet ruin beside the falls, before the city reinvented it in 1994 as a pedestrian and cycling crossing.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours follow the Mississippi downstream past the bridge, tracing Minneapolis's shift from milling powerhouse to riverside park, and linking Hill's railroad ambitions to the abandoned mills and locks nearby.